AbstractsEducation Research & Administration

Drug courts are collaborative community programs that provide active oversight and compliance monitoring of individuals engaged in the criminal justice continuum. Adult drug court program requirements include alcohol and other drug treatment, community support services, and other ancillary services intended to promote life changes in participants and ultimately, prosocial behaviors. One ancillary program service offered to drug court participants is the introduction or referral of individuals to community colleges when they do not possess a high school diploma or general equivalency diploma (GED) and when participants otherwise experience difficulty securing employment. Criminal recidivism is the default outcome measure used to determine drug court program performance. The academic research community strongly suggests the development of additional drug court outcome metrics. With an identified gap of community college success definition literature, this study provides a consensus definition of community college success for adult drug court participants. Judges and program coordinators administer drug court operations and as such are experts working in the field. Through an interpretive qualitative methodological approach, all Oregon drug court judges and coordinators were solicited to participate as an expert Delphi panel. The Delphi expert panel of 10 offers statewide geographical representation including adult drug court coverage of urban, rural, and frontier territories. The 10 panelists represent a combined 106.5 years of drug court experience. Several authors advocate that the minimum Delphi panel include 10 panelists (Keeney et al., 2011). Since the Delphi panel was a homogeneous group, only comprised of adult drug court judges and coordinators, the study achieved minimum panel size (Turoff, 2006). The first Delphi round consisted of eight open ended questions that the expert panel responded electronically through Qualtrics © (Provo, UT). Responses were coded to reveal themes that were returned to the expert panel in the second Delphi round as potential metric definitions for selection. In Delphi Round Two the expert panel arrived at a consensus definition of community college success for drug court participants. In the third Delphi round the expert panel affirmed that the consensus definition was an acceptable definition for statewide use by Oregon’s 27 adult drug courts. Findings include a consensus community college success metric for adult drug court participants, a benevolent sobriety circle, and suggestions to implement and make the new metric operational. Study findings represent a statewide adult drug court experience in Oregon, but also have generalizability to drug court programs throughout the United States.